


Somewhere Over

by elle_stone



Category: Rent - Larson
Genre: Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Canon, References to Major Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-07
Updated: 2007-03-07
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:45:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is not one day when everything is better again.  It happens slowly, haltingly.  But it happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere Over

**Red**

Mark’s eyes are bleary and his limbs ache dully and Roger looks at him oddly and asks if he is sick, and Mark says no, he doesn’t think so, and Roger puts the back of his hand to Mark’s forehead and says, you feel warm.

It is an awkward time.

They are just leaving a long period of Roger’s mourning, a bleak expanse of months in which Mimi’s ghost haunted the loft, in that way that ghosts do, whispering and hinting at those secrets kept eternally by the dead. There is not one day when everything is suddenly better again. It happens slowly, haltingly. But it happens.

Roger’s hand lingers a moment too long on Mark’s forehead.

“I’m fine,” Mark says, and pulls away.

They sit on the couch and drink tea, which Roger made inexpertly, his eyes always straying, and the room starts to blur at the edges of Mark’s vision. He asks if Roger feels it, too, but the answer is no. For the first time in a long time, he notices the silence of the loft, the quiet hum of their breathing, and it does not bother him. It does not feel harsh to his nerves, does not make him want to pace, to run, to leave. He closes his eyes, opens them, but the black does not disappear, only curls in at the edges until the world is gone. There are hands to his wrists, hands to his face, a voice in his ear, but he turns away and falls, instead, out of reach.

 

*

 

**Orange**

Neither is angry, but they act as if they are. They fool each other with the feeling that they paint across their faces. Roger’s anger is grim, sullen, and heavy; Mark’s is flared and frantic and exhausted. They stare each other down.

“You should have told me you were sick,” Roger says, his arms crossed and his face creased with heavy lines. 

“I didn’t know,” Mark snaps. It feels like every blanket in the loft has been piled over his bed, but his chills have left him, and he pushes the whole mountain of them onto the floor.

“It’s because you don’t take care of yourself. The last thing I need to be worrying about right now is your sorry ass.” The way Roger talks, anyone else would think he was really furious. But he comes to sit on the end of Mark’s bed, to put one hand, heavy and solid, on Mark’s ankle.

Mark has been asleep for almost a full day. The orange light of late sunset is streaming in through the window, coloring Roger’s face and the dingy white sheets on Mark’s mattress. Roger looks like he has been awake for a week straight.

“Get out,” Mark says. He tries to make his own voice sound angry, too, but it comes out full of fatigue and grief. “You shouldn’t be here. I’m contagious.”

“You’ve probably been contagious for a while,” Roger answers, and does not leave, nor make any attempts to leave. Mark is burning, aching, and the feel of Roger’s hand on his bare ankle is the only thing he allows himself to feel. He closes his eyes.

“I’ll be fine,” Roger is saying. “So will you. This is all backwards, you know. I don’t understand what’s going on. You’re always turning everything on its head, Mark, you know.”

 

*

 

**Yellow**

Maureen hands him a brush and a bucket of paint and tells him to get to work.

“But I’m sick,” he says.

She looks him over and says he seems fine to her, and she is right, because it has been two weeks and his health has returned and the loft has become what it was before, except that Roger spends most of his time outside, wandering the city to unknown places. Mark doesn’t follow. Mark can’t.

Maureen has moved all of the furniture to the center of the room, brought in ladders and step stools, put on old ratty clothes—like the t-shirt she stole from him that does not fit her, that has not fit him since high school, that has a hole in one of its sleeves. One of the walls is half-painted yellow. The brush in his hand is dripping yellow paint onto his shoe. 

“Does Joanne know you’re redecorating her apartment?” he asks.

“No,” Maureen answers, unconcerned. “I thought this would make it more cheery, though. You agree?”

He says that he does, but the truth is he doesn’t care. Maureen’s hair is tied back and she has paint on her cheek and she looks exhausted. She is beautiful, and he feels nothing for her.

“Where do I start?” he asks.

For a while, they don’t talk. He wonders why he came over in the first place. What was it he wanted to say? Did he know even then? Maureen asks him to hold the ladder for her as she climbs to the top.

“Talked to Roger yesterday,” she says, calm and casual, and runs the brush carefully over the windowsill. 

“Yeah? How is he?”

“You’re the one who lives with him and you’re asking me.”

“You’re the one who brought him up.”

Maureen pauses in her work. She drops the hand holding the brush to her side, turns to look down at him, scratches at the paint that has dried on the skin of her cheek. She stares at him for so long that he starts to feel nervous under her gaze: her strong, appraising, and unwavering gaze. She sighs.

“You really want to know how he is?” she asks.

When Mark doesn’t answer she tells him anyway.

“He’s in love with you.”

Mark still doesn’t answer, and eventually she turns back to her work.

Just as he is leaving, he brings up the subject one more time.

“Is he really?” he asks. In this question, he lets himself go, for one moment, lets his guard down for those few minutes, and Maureen’s face softens as she looks at him, and she puts her arms around him without any hint that she will, so that he is completely unprepared. He feels like all of his breath is leaving him. He is suffocating against her and he feels better than he has in a long time.

“He is really,” she answers. “He really is.”

 

*

 

**Green**

They still pay rent, but barely. Mark has taken a job as a waiter, and Roger has begun to play, again, at the old clubs where everyone used to sing along with all his words. He takes every paycheck to Mark, under the belief that Mark is good with money, that he knows how to save and store, where to spend. Mark has yet to explain what, to him, is obvious: that if he knew anything about money he would be right where his parents want him—using his business education, making them proud—instead of trying to sell the documentary that is the only piece of work of which he is proud.

But Roger does not think of these things. He remembers, instead, all the days he pushed crumpled green bills into Mark’s long, pale fingers, and told him, ordered him, not to let him have the money back again. Those were the dark and shuddering days of withdrawal, when no one trusted him, when he did not trust himself, when Mark did not know where to hide the money he was meant to hide, because there no longer existed a corner where Roger would not look.

One day, Roger hands him the bills again, and Mark looks at the small stack of them in his hand, and realizes, quietly and without effort, that he and Roger haven’t spoken in eight days. One week and one day. How many hours, how many minutes? He doesn’t know, but Maureen’s words echo.

There isn’t any food in the loft, so they take Roger’s money and go out for dinner.

The café is crowded and the people around them are noisy, and Mark can hear every word of conversation from the next table over, laughing and joyous. He touches Roger’s sleeve and Roger looks up.

“If you had something important to tell me, you would, right?” he asks. His voice is nervous and he hates his own nervousness, hates how young and awkward it makes him feel. Roger stares at him, expressionless and blank, for so long that Mark worries he misunderstood and is offended.

Finally, the answer, in a voice cracked and creaky with disuse: “Of course.”

But his silence implies that he never had anything to say, and Mark eats his first good meal in two weeks with an ever growing disdain for the quiet. He drums his fingers on the table and curses the opportunity they let slip through.

“I would never hurt you,” Roger says, so sudden and so quiet that Mark does not hear, and Roger has to repeat the words, the only words in all those days—all those months—that have mattered.

And everything becomes clear.

Mark asks Roger questions and Roger answers them, and they stay, Mark’s fingertips still touching the corner of Roger’s sleeve, as their plates are cleared away and the café empties and the manger tells them to leave. The sky outside darkens. They order coffee. It comes, and they drink only a little, and it becomes cold.

“How long?” Mark asks.

Roger answers, “I don’t know—does it matter?”

“I don’t know.”

It seems that the answer to everything is I don’t know.

Mark asks, “What do you want to do now?”

“I want to be with you,” Roger answers. “But I also want you to be happy, and I don’t think those two things are the same.”

“But they are.”

“But I don’t know what to do.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

When I don’t know finally becomes It doesn’t matter, and the streetlights come on, and the manager starts to cry because they will not leave, Mark moves his hand from Roger’s sleeve to Roger’s wrist, and they stand up. In the loft, they light candles. They spend the night on the couch—Mark asleep, with his head on Roger’s shoulder, and Roger not asleep, but only closing his eyes, only pretending.

 

*

 

**Blue**

“You want to know something?” Roger asks.

There is only one day of the year that is the perfect first day of spring and this is it. They have traveled far out of their way to find it. The air is warm and the grass, beneath their backs, is bright, fresh green, and there is just the right amount of sun. They are looking up at the sky, and it is the kind of blue he used to think you only got to notice if you were young: a clean sweeping blue, with only a few floating white clouds. But if age is measured in experience, then he has seen enough to provide him with a lifetime of years. Yet he can still see this sky. It is amazing, he knows.

This is it.

“What sort of ‘something’ is this?” Mark asks. “Don’t ruin my mood, Roger. I’m happy. Let me be happy.”

There are a few moments of silence, but Mark lets them slip by, unnoticed. Roger shifts, next to him, so he is leaning on one elbow, facing Mark.

“I like it that you’re happy,” he starts, “but,” slow and unsteady, “I wanted to say that…that every relationship I’ve ever had, I’ve fucked up.”

And what can Mark say to answer that?

“Just because the relationships were fucked up doesn’t mean it was all your fault,” he says, and doesn’t look at Roger’s face, and wishes, somehow, that he could take this never-ending guilt unto himself. “And—you didn’t kill them. Don’t think that.”

Roger falls back down on the ground again. Their shoulders touch. Above them, the clouds move slowly. Mark closes his eyes.

“I didn’t think enough with April, and with Mimi I though too much. That was the problem,” Roger says.

Mark opens his eyes and Roger is looking at him, and Roger is asking him, and Roger is pleading with him, and Mark looks back up at the sky again.

“Maureen and I never talked about anything important. We talked around things we couldn’t talk through,” he says.

“April and I were always sharing our bad habits.”

“Maureen and I were too alike. We knew how to push each other’s buttons.”

“I lied to Mimi, when I said I wouldn’t leave.”

“I told Maureen it didn’t bother me when I found out that she was cheating.”

“I never told April I loved her.”

“I only told Maureen I hated her.”

“I was always jealous.”

“I could never trust her.”

“I’m afraid.”

And then, again, there is nothing Mark can say.

 

*

 

**Indigo**

Joanne invites them to one of her fancy dinners. They take a taxi; Joanne pays. Outside, the city shifts, uncertain, from spring to summer, and Mark watches the people pass by on the street, carrying their jackets folded over their arms.

The hall is grand, and grandly lit: all chandeliers and yellow flickering candles, mirrors on every wall, surfaces trimmed in gold. Roger is wearing a dark blue jacket. He looks good, but uncomfortable, and when he catches Mark’s eye, he gives a weak smile that hides nothing. They stay in corners and let Joanne and Maureen do all the talking.

Roger keeps a space between them—won’t let their hands or even their shoulders touch—but when a wealthy looking couple engages them in conversation, he introduces himself as Roger Davis, musician, and Mark as “my boyfriend, Mark Cohen. He makes films.”

 

*

 

**Violet**

Not far from the loft, there is a small, cramped, shadow of a bookstore, where Collins buys dark, shaky paperbacks for fifty cents or a dollar each. When he leaves the city, the books end up scattered around the loft, where Mark will pick them up only to be distracted, where Roger will skim through them with his mind always somewhere else.

Sometimes the books sit for months without a glance from anyone.

At the end of August, life starts to slow. They get up later and later. The temperature has not yet dropped. Mark looks out the window and has to close his eyes against the sharp glare of the setting sun. He turns around and sees Roger staring at him.

“I thought you were reading,” Mark says.

“Can’t concentrate,” he answers, and lets the book fall down to the floor without a second glance.

Mark smiles, but the distance between them is unbearable. He walks quickly to close it but—

“Stop,” Roger warns him. “If you step on Collins’s book, he’ll be pissed.”

“I don’t care about Collins and his book,” Mark grumbles, but he stoops down to pick up the paperback anyway, and as he does, something falls from between its pages.

“What’s that?” Roger asks.

Mark follows his gaze, confused for a moment—then quietly picks up a flattened, ancient flower from the floorboards.

“It’s a violet,” he says, and holds it out in his open palm for Roger to see.

They are a silent for a moment, both staring down at the thin, fragile, petals—saved, preserved, for years maybe from a quiet, unnoticed death.

Roger reaches out on hand to touch the dulled purple edge, then draws back.

Mark nods and slips the flower back between the pages of the book, which he then sets on the table, to wait for Collins to return to the city again.


End file.
